Video Game / Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle

The Town Square
You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript New England town. Like most any other nondescript New England town, there's not much to see or do here, but maybe you'll find something amusing and enjoyable to do.
A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the square.

Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle is a spinoff of the minimalist Interactive Fiction Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die and the differently minimalist Aisle. Just as in the latter, you can only make one move, and then the game ends. You have a host of other commands to choose from, and each one leads to hundreds of possible endings, each one sillier than the last.

The game can be downloaded here, or played online here.

It has also been "ported" to Uncyclopedia.

---

PUTPBAA uses the following tropes:

• All Just a Dream: Mocked with "wake me" and "wake booth", which both result in the target of the action waking up to realise that the game was all a dream.
• Anticlimax:
  • "Yay." *** You jumped ***
  • Typing in "lose" will simply result in *** You lose *** with no further ending.
• And the Adventure Continues: Many endings don't have a concrete resolution.
• The Bad Guy Wins: "Unlock booth" results in the player finding a half-dressed superhero inside, with the ending text mentioning that "you, the villain, have won".
• Becoming the Genie: If you "bunk in" the phone booth, it will envelop you during the night, turning you into the phone booth.
• Bittersweet Ending: Several.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Typing "wave" results in the player character waving at the player through the fourth wall.
• Call-Back: In Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die, the way to win is to push the booth over. The same applies here, and the game points out your good memory.
• Cargo Ship: Invoked. Several endings imply romantic involvement between you and the booth. Others aren't so subtle.
• Cataclysm Climax: Well let's see... among the "Game Overs" include death by meteor, death by the wrath of God, death by "ICE STOOOOOOORM", death by Cosmic Horror...
• Creator Cameo: Typing "credits" has the game list a "group of hooligans", all of whom contributed to the game.
• Cry into Chest: "Squeeze booth", as part of the player character reassuring the booth that they really do love it.
• Cutting the Knot: Type in "win". "Okay." *** You win *** Or so it seems...
• Developer's Foresight: The whole point. If you can think of a verb, it probably does something here. There are over 200 endings to the game, most of which are documented in the ending archive.
  • Remember how typing "inventory" causes your pants to explode? Try typing "disarm pants" (Pants don't have arms, they have legs), "disleg pants" (You take off the legs, but they're still exploding), "throw pants", "eat pants", both of which result in the game chastising you for using information from a previous playthrough, "remove pants" (The pants explode inside the phone booth and the you're killed by the debris), "wave pants" (You're killed by a random tsunami), and then "deactivate pants" (The game goes into detail about the alternate timeline created by the time machine you used to know to do this, and your pants explode during the exposition).
  • If you try to perform an action with a direction, you get creative bug responses. "Waltz with (direction)", for example, gets you the response, "Your new name is Waltzes with Bugs."
    • If you try to waltz without specifying "with", the text parser itself gets offended to think the player wouldn't try to elaborate past a two-word entry.
• Diabolus ex Machina: "Cook booth" ends with a safe falling on the protagonist. "Burn booth" ends with God smiting you with lightning.
• Die, Chair, Die!: "Fight", "smash", "destroy", and other similar words cause the protagonist to try to destroy the booth. It ends badly, unsurprisingly.
• Digging to China: "Dig". This is your intention, but instead you starve to death while digging the tunnel.
• The Dog Bites Back: There are a number of ways to kill the phone booth. Unfortunately, there are even MORE ways it can kill you instead.
• Downer Ending: Most endings end badly for the protagonist.
• Everybody Lives: Many of the "happy" endings are like this.
• Exact Words: Some of the endings like to misinterpret commands such as "tie booth", which it reads in the sense of ending a competition in a draw. This can be confusing to those who try synonyms like "fix booth".
• Gainax Ending: "Eat booth" results in a mishmash of references to Aisle and So Far (bizarre enough that even the parser feels obliged to comment); "kick booth" seems like a utter non-sequitur unless you've played Losing Your Grip.
• Grand Finale: Parodied with "close", which describes the player character closing their business in the style of a grand finale to a long-running TV series, with plenty of Celebrity Cameos, side characters and former main characters coming Back for the Finale, and every character's arc concluding in a satisfactory way.
• Happily Ever After: Occasionally, though usually in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
• Have a Nice Death: Almost every ending, regardless of whether you die or not, has a unique parser message that ends the game.
• Interface Screw: After using "undo" as a verb, no matter what keys you press the game will type out, one letter per keypress, "drive" and execute that command, to much confusion if it was an accident. Even more confusing since "drive" is not one of the recognized commands in the game proper. This is a shout-out to Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, which pulls the same trick.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: If you try to "waylay booth", you get a flashback to your 15 years of training in the Terran Galactic Defense Force, where you were apparently motivated by constant threats of kitten-pulverization.
• In Spite of a Nail: "Deactivate pants" results in a time travel-induced alternate timeline where William McKinley survived his presidential term, Hitler slipped in the bathtub and knocked some sense into himself, Cracker Jacks were invented but don't come with a prize, and your parents married different people, abandoning you and leaving you with a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite this, you're still around, but your pants still explode and kill you.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Most of the endings result in the game berating you, and none give any points.
• The Hero Dies: A LOT.
• The Last Straw: If you type "fill self", you will eat at a buffet until you're full, then be convinced by the phone booth to eat one wafer-thin mint, causing you to explode.
• Layman's Terms: The result for "brief" combines this with Motor Mouth. "Superbrief" simplifies things even further.
• Logic Bomb: Type in "enter self", and the parser will briefly explain why the game engine makes it impossible for something to be inside itself, then try to do it anyway, with predictable results.
• Love Hurts: Choosing to "love booth" causes the phone booth to give you a big hug. Did I say big hug? I mean it falls on you and crushes you.
• Medium-Shift Gag: "Dance with booth" briefly switches the game's format from prose into a Script Fic.
• Mind Screw: Kick the phone booth, and it will beg you not do, and then shatter and sink into the mud, in a scene almost word-for-word from an early scene in the surreal 1998 IF game Losing Your Grip.
  • Also, look southeast, and the booths will multiply until seemingly everything is phone booths. Could possibly be a reference to the IF game Shade.
  • Try to undo without performing an action first, as described under Interface Screw.
  • Typing "eat" will be interpreted as eating the phone booth, and will end with something so nonsensical the game itself will say "What the hell was that about?"
  • Also try "waltz with me", in which the player character flies the "rocketbooth" to the centre of the universe, in order to dance with their counter-self.
• Multiple Endings: The entire point of the game.
• Never Heard That One Before: Try entering "xyzzy", and a disembodied voice will complain about being summoned every time someone decides to make this reference.
• Nonstandard Game Over: Many times, you don't exactly die, but the game ends anyway.
• Noodle Incident: Type in "walk" and the phone booth somehow impregnates you. And you end up in the Gobi desert.
• Noodle Implements: Typing in "undo" without having previously done anything.
• Oh God, with the Verbing!: Typing "open booth" results in nonsense written in a particularly Nutty Professor-esque format.
• Overly Long Gag: "Look in pants", which results in the parser claiming there's nothing of interest in there and spending several more messages laughing at its own joke, and "hold", which results in a series of hold messages until the player character shoves the phone they're using into their brain.
• Reticulating Splines: "Smock my knickers" gives you this phrase.
• Running Gag: Pants, especially the exploding variety. Also, several endings end with the message "You have a wacky pratfall."
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Type "verbose", and the game will describe your specific location in the universe in much more detail.
• Shout-Out: To lots of other Text Adventures. And pop culture. And all sorts of other stuff. Many endings outright describe the plot of movies or books.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Depending on the ending, you may end up being a MIT student, Maxwell Smart, or even Superman. The player's gender can vary between endings, too.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: "Touch booth", which appears to be the lead-up to a sex scene (with the booth), before it cuts away.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: In "Examine booth", David Morgan-Mar appears to be this for the player character.
• So Once Again, the Day Is Saved: Two endings cast you as Superman of all people!
• Stuff Blowing Up: Type "blow up booth", "esplode booth", "blow up self", or "esplode self". Esploding things results in a more cartoonish explosion.
• Take That!:
  • Sort of. Typing "sleep" prompts this response:
    "Looks like another cold night coming. Your best bet seems to be the phone booth. Huddled inside, you catch some winks as best as you can before the cops move you on. The half bottle of cooking sherry you stole seems to help. Next day, the struggle begins again."
    *** You were the CEO of pets.com ***
  • Typing "yes" results in this:
    "You send in your vote of affirmation... but it doesn't get counted."
    *** New England? I meant Florida ***
• Title Drop: Do it! You'll win! Really!
• The Many Deaths of You: Again, the whole point of the game.
• Turbine Blender: If you try to "fly", in a paragraph-long reference to Photopia.
• Twist Ending:
  • "Wait". The player character is unable to bring herself to call her love interest, who is away fighting in a war. He returns safe years later, and there's a romantic scene where he tells her that he loves her, and that he's about to tell her something that will make her just as happy as he is: He's figured out that he's gay.
  • Then there's the above Take That!, where a depressing paragraph about you, a poor man trying to sleep, actually having been the CEO of dot-com bubble company pets.com.
• Wall of Text: You get one by typing "about", in which the game rambles on about a perfect night you once had.
• Weddings for Everyone: One of the endings ("booth, yes") involves a wedding. In it, you marry the phone booth.
• A Winner Is You: The "winning" endings, such as "pick up the phone booth and aisle" and "push booth".
• You Can't Get Ye Flask:
  • Most verbs (such as "get" or "kiss") resolve differently depending on the target you specify, either "phone booth" or "me". A few also have different endings depending on if you specify a target at all (such as "love" or "listen").
  • There are different responses for the cardinal directions (and up and down) depending on if you type "walk" or "look".
  • Typing "sit on" with a subject results in the same response as "walk", for some reason. (For instance, "sit on floor" parses to "walk down".)
  • A few actions, such as "hug", "set", or "switch" don't result in an ending but instead a snarky comment.
  • This is also lampshaded if you type "waltz (subject)" rather than "waltz WITH (subject)".

---